milliways_bar | (no subject)

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The Pace family re-enter the bar from Antar, all dressed up in their wedding clothes. Liam is carrying Megan, while Karen and Charlie follow a step behind, talking quietly.

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He shrugs. "So many hangups," he says simply, and honks loudly when Megan beeps his nose back. "I'm not saying I don't want to be with him always . . ."

"But you don't want to have to be?" Liam asks quietly, watching his brother's face.

He looks at Liam helplessly and sighs. "Maybe."

Liam sighs, rubbing at his temples.

"Look, Char... I don't think Darien's going to force anything on you, if you don't want it. Talk to him."

"No, I know that. It's not that." He sighs again and tries to explain, "It's just that if he asks and I say no, is that going to be what ends us? If I say yes, is that going to be what ends us? Are we doomed no matter what?"

"Doomed," Megan says wisely, nodding, and Charlie beeps her nose again.

"After everything you've seen here, and outside, baby brother, are you so sure anything's going to end you?"

Charlie gives him a duh look. "I do know I'm not in his future. Unless time can be rearranged somehow so that he doesn't have that future and I get to stick around--and I don't know if that's a good idea, considering what changing time has done to me."

Liam shakes his head.

"No, you know you're not in the future of the Darien who first came here. But... well. When you go back to the island, are Claire and Sawyer there?"

"Yeah," he mutters.

"And was Kevin here, when that Darien was coming in?"

"No," Charlie says and rubs his nose. "But that could mean he leaves at some point. People do."

Liam eyes him. "You really think he'd leave while his little brother was still here?"

Kevin and Liam understand each other.

"Well, I don't know what happens, now, do I," Charlie says, perhaps a bit snappishly. "Suppose Darien asks me to marry him and I say no and he leaves because he's so unhappy and then Kevin leaves because Darien's gone and then Darien comes back from that future?"

He's thought about this. In detail.

"...Char, you've really been overthinking this", Liam tells him, not unsympathetically. "You know time's strange here. Take it as it comes, eh? You might be surprised."

"I know."

Somewhat sulkily. Don't try to be logical with a man who's got his pouty on.

"It's just never gone right for me. Never. And it's so easy to see all the ways it could go wrong."

"Sounds like you're overdue some good luck, then."

"Yeah. Wish I thought the universe worked that way."

"You used to", Liam says softly. "And I think... sometimes, it does."

Charlie flexes his hand, where the faded ink of FATE across the back is barely visible.

"The universe," he says slowly, "is completely indifferent to us. Just look out the window if you want proof of that."

"You forget, Charlie. I've seen proof that there is something beyond that. I've been there."

It changed him, in some ways. It had to.

"I think all that is outside the universe we know," he says dryly. "And all things considered, I'm not entirely conviced our best interests are their concern, either."

"I have to believe they are, in the end. And I believe it's of our universe, if not in it, or you wouldn't have been there."

And isn't this just the role reversal.

Megan has wandered back to Karen, by now.

"I don't mean alternative earth type of outside. I mean, here's reality, waaaaaay over here, over the wall and across the moat and through the gate, is all that afterlife stuff."

"But that's the same thing we were always taught. It's not a physical place, it never was. Though somehow we could get there and keep our physical form... but I never claimed to understand everything."

"Right, right," Charlie says, "and what I'm saying is, they don't care what happens here anymore than those stars exploding outside do. So don't talk to me about fate or the universe or whatever else taking care of things. It doesn't work that way. I can't believe for a second that it does."